Alec Baldwin calls Spike Lee ‘one of the greatest filmmakers alive.’ When the two get together, knowledge is dropped.

For a long time, Alec Baldwin couldn’t get Spike Lee on the phone. “He is impossible to reach. He finally called me back and said, ‘Hey!’ as if nothing happened,” Baldwin said at a recent Tribeca Talk at the 2018 festival. On the phone that day, Lee had agreed to do the Tribeca Talk, but put forth a request: that they not talk about Lee’s movies. So Baldwin had Lee pick a movie to talk about instead. Lee chose On the Waterfront.

Onstage, they talked about Lee’s movies anyway—including his highly-anticipated BlacKkKlansman, which recently premiered at Cannes to great reviews. The film stars Lee’s long-time collaborator Denzel Washington’s son, John David Washington. The younger Washington plays Ron Stallworth, the first black policeman in ’70s Colorado Springs, who infiltrated the KKK after seeing an ad for membership in the local paper.

Below are a few things we learned from Lee and Baldwin’s wide-ranging conversation, which can be viewed in its entirety here.